Intercom to Redshift

This page provides you with instructions on how to extract data from Intercom and load it into Redshift. (If this manual process sounds onerous, check out Stitch, which can do all the heavy lifting for you in just a few clicks.)

What is Intercom?

Intercom is a powerful platform for communicating with customers and leads. It provides customer messaging apps for a variety of uses, from targeted messaging to customer support. It offers tracking, filtering, and segmentation functionality on all the data it collects to allow users to analyze interactions to derive business insights.

What is Redshift?

When it was released in 2013, Amazon Redshift was the first cloud data warehouse. It uses defined schemas, columnar data storage, and massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture to provide a base for analytics reporting.

Getting data out of Intercom

You get data out of Intercom using the Intercom API, which offers access to endpoints that can provide information on users, tags, segments, conversations, and more. For example, to get data about a conversation, you could call GET /conversations/[id].

Preparing Intercom data

Once you've figured out what you want to pull down and how to pull it, you need to map the data that comes out of each Intercom API endpoint into a schema that can be inserted into your database.

This means that for each value in the response, you need to identify a predefined datatype (i.e. INTEGER, DATETIME, etc.) and build a table that can receive them. The Intercom API documentation can give you a good sense of what fields will be provided by each endpoint, along with their corresponding datatypes.

Complicating things is the fact that these records are not always "flat" – in other words, there may be values that are actually lists. This complicates things because it means you'll most likely to create additional tables to be able to capture the unpredictable cardinality in each record. (The "tags" value in the data above is an example of this.)

Loading data into Redshift

When you've identified all the columns you want to insert, use the Reshift CREATE TABLE statement to make a table in your data warehouse to receive the data.

Now you can replicate your data. It may seem as if the easiest way to do that (especially if there isn't much of it) is to build INSERT statements and add data to your table row by row. If you have any experience with SQL, this probably will be your first inclination. But beware! Redshift isn't optimized for inserting data one row at a time. If you have a high volume of data to be inserted, you should instead load the data into Amazon S3 and then use the Redshift COPY command to import it into Redshift.

Keeping Intercom data up to date

At this point you've coded up a script or written a program to get the data you want and successfully moved it into your data warehouse. But how will you load new or updated data? It's not a good idea to replicate all of your data each time you have updated records. That process would be painfully slow and resource-intensive.

Instead, identify key fields that your script can use to bookmark its progression through the data and use to pick up where it left off as it looks for updated data. Auto-incrementing fields such as updated_at or created_at work best for this. When you've built in this functionality, you can set up your script as a cron job or continuous loop to get new data as it appears in Intercom.

And remember, as with any code, once you write it, you have to maintain it. If Intercom modifies its API, or the API sends a field with a datatype your code doesn't recognize, you may have to modify the script. If your users want slightly different information, you definitely will have to.

Other data warehouse options

Redshift is great, but sometimes you need to optimize for different things when you're choosing a data warehouse. Some folks choose to go with Google BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Snowflake, or Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse, which are RDBMSes that use similar SQL syntax, or Panoply, which works with Redshift instances. Others choose a data lake, like Amazon S3 or Delta Lake on Databricks. If you're interested in seeing the relevant steps for loading data into one of these platforms, check out To BigQuery, To Postgres, To Snowflake, To Panoply, To Azure Synapse Analytics, To S3, and To Delta Lake.

Easier and faster alternatives

If all this sounds a bit overwhelming, don’t be alarmed. If you have all the skills necessary to go through this process, chances are building and maintaining a script like this isn’t a very high-leverage use of your time.

Thankfully, products like Stitch were built to move data from Intercom to Redshift automatically. With just a few clicks, Stitch starts extracting your Intercom data, structuring it in a way that's optimized for analysis, and inserting that data into your Redshift data warehouse.